Managing is an important skill, but too often it is thrust upon the unsuspecting and unwilling. I’ve learned a lot about managing others though hard knocks, but also by making mistakes. Here’s the most importing thing I’ve learned about being a good manager: it’s not about being “the boss.” It’s helping others and helping yourself to get things done.

The best managers never deliver surprises. If you’re doing a poor job, you need to know it. Your manager needs to make it clear that he or she knows it, too, and immediately. Nothing is hidden or left unspoken. A good manager lets you know immediately and sets out a path for you to do better. A bad manager saves things up to use as weapons against you. Good managers don’t let employees speculate.  If there’s a problem coming up, too much work, not enough work, a major shakeup, a good manager informs you. You are never left in the dark. Managers like this are rare and precious.

There should never be a time, especially during a performance review, where your manager surprises you with stored up lists of failures and poor performance issues. That, in itself, is a clear sign that you have a bad manager.

But it is very hard to learn to manage well.

Here’s the first step: if you want to be a really good and really effective manager you’ll need to learn to deal immediately with any and all performance problems.

When you, as a manager, see something happening that doesn’t go as you expected, immediately address it. Do not store it up for later. For example, someone misses a deadline. Don’t shrug it off. Sit down on the spot and discuss it. Right that minute.

I’d recommend this process:

1. Ask first: were we clear about the deadline and what we wanted?
2. Allow no equivocation. Don’t let the other person to jump to excuses. Be firm and let them know that you’ll discuss that soon. The first step is getting agreement that everyone was clear about the deadline and the deliverables.
3. Once you have agreement move on to “why that didn’t happen” – the excuses.
4. Once the excuses were listed, discuss why they affected the deliverable and how the employee could have worked to eliminate them OR notified you early enough for you to do something about them.
5. Set a plan for the future with clear steps. Don’t repeat the same mistake.
6. Follow up. When a project comes in on time, repeat this process and find out what worked. Do that again. If another deadline is missed, bring out the notes from this past review, repeat the process, and refine.
7. Never let a problem go unnoticed.

If you follow a process like this, one where you listen, make notes, and show that you hold clear standards and are willing to work with employees to make effective changes, you’ll find that you can achieve miracles.

And you’ll never have to deliver a surprise performance review again.

Management Essentials: How To Address A Performance Problem is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

Here is a shameful truth about today’s business environment: the vast majority of the people who manage others and operate businesses have had no training and very little assistance in learning the basics of management. Good management skills are too often thought of as natural personal qualities. If you’re good at a job, you’ll be good at managing and leading others.

That turns out not to be the case. Managing others is difficult. Running a business is surprisingly difficult. I spent the best part of my 25+ years inside businesses managing, not because I was naturally gifted or trained, but because I accumulated experience managing others. I was glad to leave it behind to focus on what I’m really good at: writing. But I had to become a good manager to survive and prosper in business. I wish I’d had more help and training early in my career. Good managers need to be trained, mentored, coached, and ideally, apprenticed to great managers.

That’s why I’m starting this new series: Management Essentials. I’ll share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned, some of them the hard way, and give you some things that will help you manage employees, even virtual ones, and, perhaps, manage yourself and your own time better.

In this series I’ll cover:

• How to fire (you’ll need to think this through before you hire your first employees).
• Eliminating busywork — no employees simply filling time.
• How to hire.
• Giving constructive criticism.
• What to do with a smelly employee. Seriously.
• No bad moods.
• How much goofing off to allow—and when to encourage it.
• The role of social media for the “shop floor” employee.

Tomorrow: how to deal with performance problems.

Management Essentials: How To Manage, Lead, and Succeed In Today’s Workplace is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

There are few things in life as pleasurable as putting on a new pair of thick cotton gym socks.

Actually, there are many things. They are typically simple, inconsequential things, but they bring us pleasure. They feel good to us, evoke memories, or alleviate a problem or pain we’ve endured. They make us smile because they are simple, often private recognitions and momentary awareness of the uniqueness and special qualities of life.

The other day my wife bought me a bag of new white gym socks, the kind that go up over your ankle, but not up your calf (those I do not care for). The socks I’ve been wearing for the last few years were transparent at the heels. I’d been tossing them out, sock by sock, as they wore though. I can’t say I was excited about opening a bag of socks, but as I pulled the first one on it was as if I’d forgotten what a sock was.

This new one was thick and soft and hugged my foot to a forgotten degree of snugness. There were no sags or gaps and no rubbing against my worn running shoes. For a moment I considered adding new socks to my monthly shopping list so I could feel like this all of the time. I thought for a while about making these socks, so white that they glow, a part of my standard uniform, which typically consists of faded jeans and a pirate t-shirt. Instead of putting them in the clothes hamper at night, I’d put the socks in the rag bin and take out a fresh pair from the stacks of new and never-worn ones, always reveling in their perfect caressing fluffiness. Perhaps I could start up a blog and twitter feed about socks . . .

Or I could enjoy this simple pleasure and get on with my day.

For today’s assignment, take a moment and let your enthusiasm for something simple, something special, run wild. Don’t try to be clever or to find something that many others will share. Just take that one little thing that makes you unexpectedly happy and write about it.

If you’re not writing this assignment with a smile on your face you’re doing it wrong.

Click here to view and complete previous writing assignments.

And buy a copy of the Writing Assignments book!

Writing Assignment: Rhapsodize On A Simple Pleasure is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

If you’re going to wear your 6th generation iPod Nano as a watch, you’re going to need a case and band for it. I picked the LunaTik RedRun for its combination of great style, solid design, and comfort.

I like it.

This is a case that is designed to install your iPod Nano in and leave it there. I haven’t removed mine since I tightened the four screws into place and don’t plan on ever taking it out. If you want something that you can easily remove, consider LunaTik’s snap-in design TikTok (I have not tested this model).

There are several other color varieties, black, silver, even camo, but I really like the red and black combination. My silver Nano looks great with the contrast (visible only on the sides for button and port access and underneath, displaying the Apple logo for only you to see when the band is off your wrist).

On my wrist the RedRun looks like a big sports watch. But be careful. It offers only a little protection from bumps. The iPod Nano doesn’t gain any water resistance and only a little shock protection from the case. I have to keep reminding myself to not let it get wet. This is a bigger problem than you might imagine. Every visual clue tells you that this is a rugged and tough watch. It is not (the case may be, but the iPod is not).

I really do enjoy wearing it. I may be off base, but I feel like I’m prototyping the future by wearing it. And it does keep it the iPod accessible, giving me the benefit of the Nike+ app to track my daily steps and to have a radio with me all of the time. That’s cool. And it plays music.

If you’re interested, visit the LunaTik site and watch the installation video. It’s not really tricky, but you’ll want to know what you’re doing and it will make it clear that this is pretty much a permanent installation. Yes, you can get it out, but you probably won’t. Not often.

I’m wearing mine now.

Pros: Attractive, comfortable, durable.
Cons: Pricey, semi-permanent installation (not easy to remove), offers little protection.

Reviewed: The LunaTik RedRun iPod Nano Watch Band is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

This Required Listening guest post is by Andrew Marvin

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Over the course of almost four decades, Rush has traversed several genres, including heavy metal, synth-driven pop, alternative, and modern rock. However, they are most fondly known by many as the high lords of progressive rock music.

Progressive rock rose to prominence in the 1960s and 70s as a way of elevating rock music to a new level of artistic merit. Rush released several albums during the progressive era, including their 1976 breakthrough, 2112. They outdid themselves a mere two years later, however, with the release of their prog rock masterpiece, Hemispheres.

While 2112 is consistently included on greatest album lists, Hemispheres pushed the band beyond its limits in terms of scope and musicianship. It stands as both a culmination of the progressive rock genre and a defining moment for the band itself. Here’s why it deserves a spot in your collection.

In just four tracks, Hemispheres epitomizes everything that makes progressive rock such a challenging, yet rewarding, endeavor. Elaborate song structures, complex time signatures, and esoteric lyrics all appear in force on this album.

The eponymous opening track, clocking in at over eighteen minutes and containing six different movements, features the epic scope characteristic of the genre. The twenty-minute title track on 2112 had made the band and its fans no stranger to “really long songs”, but “Hemispheres” is anything but more of the same from Rush. Rather, it supersedes “2112″ thematically by describing the war between Apollo, Bringer of Wisdom, and Dionysus, Bringer of Love. This is no mere human struggle; it is a battle between the gods, an appropriate symbol of the record’s power and scale. To this day, the mythology of Hemispheres outweighs anything in the band’s catalogue.

The album’s second side features two conventional-length tracks, which nevertheless stand as progressive classics. “Circumstances” provides a hard rock, yet philosophical, single, while “The Trees” gives the album a Tolkienesque flavor, adding the fantasy elements often found in the genre. The album concludes with the nine-and-a-half minute, twelve-part instrumental, “La Villa Strangiato”, exhibiting the band’s unmatched virtuosity and technical prowess.

Hemispheres is required listening for progressive rock and music fans alike not just because it fulfills — with astounding proficiency — all of its generic requirements. It also stands out as Rush’s last true progressive rock record, as well as one of the last great entries in the genre itself.

By the late 1970s, progressive rock was in decline. Critics considered it overwrought and pretentious, while simpler, more accessible music like punk rock and disco was gaining favor with audiences. Despite this adversity, Rush boldly released a progressive masterpiece, and it remains one of the most impressive records of their career.

The grandeur of Hemispheres, though, was not without consequence. The album saw the band overreaching, as the material became almost too complex for them to play. Because of this burden, the band made a conscious move in the opposite direction with 1980′s Permanent Waves, which featured more radio-friendly songs and new wave elements. Though many great records continue to follow, the band has yet to attempt such grandiosity again. As a result, Hemispheres defined the band by closing the door on their progressive period and paving the way for the next iteration of Rush.

While 2112 rightfully brought the band much acclaim, Hemispheres cannot be overlooked as a definitive album of its genre. Rush punctuated the progressive rock era with a towering achievement, untouchable in its scope, power, and virtuosity. That’s required listening.

You can buy Hemispheres on iTunes.

More Required Listening

Required Listening: Rush’s Hemispheres is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

I took my wife’s car, her beloved MINI Cooper, in for the yearly service the other day. I waded throughout the surprising amount of paper work to drop it off for an oil change, getting the tires rotated, and the wipers changed. I did the same thing again when picking it up. Then, before the service attendant handed me the keys he said, “You’ll be getting a customer service survey. A 10 is a pass. Everything else is a fail.” He seemed a little plaintive, a little desperate.

Typically I ignore survey requests. If there had been a problem I would have told them on the spot or asked for the service manager, but when I got the survey in my email I dutifully opened it up and gave them 10s across the board. I didn’t want to cause the poor fellow any problems.

But it’s been grating on me. Their service quality was fine, but I’ve had better (the service I receive from Lexus is truly outstanding. The BMW dealer who manages the Mini service is good, but not stellar). I just didn’t feel like I could be completely honest with them.

And that’s a problem. With this approach the dealer gets to crow about how their customers rate them with excellent service. Or management jumps all over their employees, not to fix the problems or modify their procedures, but to get customers to rank them better.

That is pointless.

I would have, if I’d been able to be accurate and honest, told them about how their drop off and pick up could be improved. I could have told them about how less paperwork and clearer instructions would have made my visit a lot better. I could have told them about how uncomfortable their waiting area is. And I could have given them excellent marks where they deserved it, not just across the board.

You can learn nothing from perfect marks. You can only learn when you get honest appraisal.

If you are going to ask your customers to provide you feedback, ask for it to be honest and complete. Follow up. Think about what you learn. And then, armed with real data, make changes.

That I’d happily rate with a perfect 10.

Perfect Or Fail: Why Customer Service Surveys Are Useless is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

You are not as smart as you think you are.

Your first draft isn’t all that good.

Neither is your second.

You cannot edit your own work.

You can become a much better writer.

More Things

More Things You Cannot Convey To A Young Writer is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

Words are interesting things. Some people call them the atoms of speech and thought. I’m not so sure about that. I think of them more as the bricks, building materials. I see words as rough, big things, not tiny, elemental particles.

We humans have a built-in ability to acquire language and to use it in very specific ways. Take a newborn child from anywhere in the world, move them to another part of the world, and they’ll acquire the local language easily. Research tells us that it takes just two generations to turn any pidgin or creole into a full blown language. It happens naturally. It’s a built-in human facility and it’s fascinating.

New words take on a life of their own, but it’s remarkably difficult for any newly created word to catch on widely. Many have tried, but artificially creating a word and getting it used is difficult.

But it is fun.

For today’s assignment, create a new word, build a definition for it, and use it in a paragraph or short piece.

Think of this as three separate assignments and keep them separate. Have fun! First, invent your word, then create a definition, then write your piece, but do not use the definition in your paragraph or short piece. Let your word do the work.

If you need help, use this word generator to get your mind thinking about word construction.

When you have your word, then develop your own definition and usage and write your paragraph. For my example, I’ve used my creation “postally”, meaning a the quality of a document or surface that is bristling with PostIt notes or flags. And my example.

I found Jeff’s desk a complete postally mess once again. I’m not sure if that means that he’s busy or simply sticky. I spent twenty minutes de-postalizing my desk where he’d left dozens more notes for me, ignoring his requests and assigned to dos. At least when he hands me a document he’s been given to review I can instantly determine the amount of revision necessary by the degree of postallishyness visibly displayed.

Try and use your word in different ways, as I did. See how it changes. Read your paragraph out loud and see how it sounds, feels in your mouth. Play with the word.

What this will teach you: if you do it right, you’ll begin to better understand the basics of grammar and word usage. The rules of the language that you’ve internalized should automatically enforce themselves with your new word. It will look and sound right or it won’t. This type of word play will help you to strengthen your writing skills.

Click here to view and complete previous writing assignments.

And buy a copy of the Writing Assignments book!

Writing Assignment: Make Up A Word And Use It Correctly is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

I’ve been following the recent articles and reports on Apple and manufacturing in China. I’ve heard some ugly terms thrown about, including “slavery.”

If true, it’s shocking and disappointing. But I fear that it is a mix of hyperbole, cultural differences, and yes, some worker abuses. Apple appears to be doing the right things to improve conditions, but that cannot overcome the differences in culture and economic realities. I suspect, from first hand accounts I’ve heard, that things are not nearly as dire as the press is painting them.

It’s easy to forget that just a few years ago China was a closed, hard-line communist country. The vast majority of its citizens were working in rural settings that we haven’t seen here in the Western world for over a hundred years. They owned virtually nothing. Now, just a few years later, if you visit a Chinese city you’ll be hard pressed know who is a citizen and who is a visitor by how they dress and what they carry.

My close friend, Elizabethe Kramer, one of the industry’s top Agile consultants, just returned from a two month business trip to China. She spent almost the entire time, from before Thanksgiving to the middle of January, in Shenzhen. She did not visit the Foxconn factories or have any dealings with Apple. She did, however, work extensively inside ZTE, a very large Chinese telecommunications company. And she shared her observations with me.

Elizabethe told me about the team of over 100 developers that she introduced to Agile concepts. She noted that they were all highly educated, almost all with college degrees and many with masters degrees. They did not, however, speak English, and she had to rely on her partner for translation. She was impressed by their friendliness, their love of all things American and Western, and their “sweetness.” She also noted that both the individuals and the larger enterprise were “highly inefficient.” “The city and buildings are new and modern, but they’re not well designed or had much thought put into them for how they’d be used.”

ZTE workers have access to nearby apartments owned by ZTE at very low rates compared to Western standards. The workers on Elizabethe’s team were all very young, but almost all married, with the requisite one child, and part of a two income, multi-generation family living in a 2-3 bedroom apartment. ZTE provides free busing to and from work and a four-story cafeteria (with the top floor being table service) for workers. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served to over 12,000 employees daily. Elizabethe ate there as well and said meals were typically under $2 USD, which the workers claimed was a fair value.

She also noted that all workers took an extended lunch break and “siesta” lasting from one and a half to two and a half hours. Most ate quickly and then napped on their personal cots. Workers clocked out for these breaks. When she mentioned this to other consultants who were doing business in other places in China they reported that this was the norm virtually everywhere.

Workers were required to work “overtime” Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, working from 8:30 A.M. to 8 P.M., with the aforementioned breaks. Other days they were finished by 5:30 PM and left promptly. Many also worked Saturdays and some Sundays. Since a grandmother at home dealt with child rearing and the household management, the workers didn’t seem stressed by the work requirements or complain.

By Western standards, Chinese workers are paid very low wages. She was told that the average worker in China makes only around $60 per month. Reports about Foxconn factory workers place their income around $22 per day, which, while low by Western standards, place them at much higher than average wages within China. Where Elizabethe was consulting these highly educated and trained workers were making more, but certainly nowhere close to what US workers in the telecom industry would be making.

While Elizabethe was tasked with introducing the latest Agile development strategies, she did note that workers, while intelligent, were not accustomed to thinking and acting on their own. She told me that no one could even print out any documents without special permission.

She also visited ZTE facilities in Nanjing and Shanghai and found that the company invested in creating good working environments.

As a side note, while delivering a presentation in Guangzhou, Elizabethe asked about iPhones, more to test their English comprehension than anything else. She received immediate applause and laughter. Many waived their iPhones in the air. While iPhones are expensive, they are highly desired, as are all Apple products. I queried my daughter’s freshman college roommate, also from China, about her new Macbook Pro and asked about what her friends used. She gave me a blank look and told me, “everyone uses Apple.” I interpreted that as meaning all of her friends from relatively wealthy families use Apple products, but I take it as a sign that this massive market is ripe for Apple expansion. Elizabethe also said she saw no Android phones or cases for them while the stall were filled with iPhone cases, including this incredibly wonderful one. No Blackberries, either.

Do workers in Foxconn factories who build products for Apple, Dell, HP, and others, work long hours at tedious tasks? Yes they do. Do they work for a fraction of what a worker in the US, Japan, or even Korea would? Yes they do?

Are they being enslaved? Clearly, they are not.

I suspect that a lot of the heat from the recent press comes from a lack of understanding about Chinese culture, their rapid change from manual agrarian life to high-tech manufacturing, and the significant differences and scales of our economies. I certainly do not approve of abusing workers, but I do not think one can insist on universal pay scales and work limitations immediately. While I have no direct experience with Apple’s supplier responsibility programs, I do have experience with other major retailers’ programs. Companies like Apple work hard to make changes, improve conditions, and develop relationships that can, over time, change entire industries, countries, and cultures.

An Observer From Shenzhen—Thoughts on Apple’s Recent Bad Press is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!

This Required Listening contribution is from Penny Mattern. In today’s recommendation she make case for an original musical and visual work in what may become a significant future musical genre.

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A friend of mine some years ago, a software engineer, told me about a video he had seen and had been mightily impressed by, named Pipe Dreams. Not only was it visually and musically clever on its face, but to him, the real clincher was that the animation was written to be driven by the music.

While Animusic and Animusic 2, DVD albums of music animation, were being developed, there were, as I understand it, basically two guys behind the effort: one who wrote the music and the animation software, and one who conceived and produced the graphics, instruments, motions, etc.

Read more about Animusic and the two albums at http://www.animusic.com.

While I don’t know whose job was the more difficult, I do know that I love these albums. They are not just novelties, they are not just ‘music videos,’ they are something more, something worth seeing and hearing.

Please, find and buy or borrow these albums and listen to them and watch them. It’s a visual experience and a musical one. Each piece is different musically and visually. Astonishing, amazing, must see and hear.

You can download and play two HD pieces from Animusic 2 here.

More Required Listening

Required Listening: And Now For Something Entirely Different: Animusic is a post from: First Today, Then Tomorrow. If you enjoyed or benefited from this post, please share, tweet, or link!